POLITICAL COLUMN

Chuck Hagel puts country before conquest

“They’re already saying Chuck Hagel may be unwilling to send troops into a war zone needlessly,” David Letterman said a few nights ago. “What kind of a nut job is he?”

Letterman, who often pretends to be a clueless goof when it comes to serious topics, actually is politically astute. And he hit on one of Hagel’s chief appeals as Barack Obama’s nominee to become secretary of defense: Hagel doesn’t believe in needless wars or endless wars or wars as our first choice.

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And, in that, both he and the president match the public mood perfectly.

Iraq has been a calamity, pouring precious U.S. lives (to say nothing of innocent Iraqi lives) and dollars into a war over mythical weapons of mass destruction. Does anybody still doubt that George W. Bush wanted to believe in those weapons because he wanted to finish off the dictator that his father had failed to remove?

I am no fan of homicidal dictators like Saddam Hussein, but the world has other homicidal dictators and before we decide to wage nearly nine-year, trillion-dollar wars to remove them all, maybe we ought to have a better reason than unresolved father-son relationships.

Our invasion of Afghanistan was certainly justified, but we are still fighting there long after our legitimate objective has been accomplished: the crippling of Al Qaeda’s ability to strike at the American homeland and the destruction of Al Qaeda’s top leadership.

But we have remained in Afghanistan to build it into an American suburb, where everybody will think like we do about human and civil rights. It is a worthy but dreamlike goal, and all we have really accomplished is to prop up a corrupt and unpopular regime in Kabul.

If that echoes Vietnam to you, it should. Hagel was a sergeant in Vietnam, a squad leader in the 9th Infantry Division, where he was awarded two Purple Hearts. He, like Obama’s nominee for secretary of state, John Kerry, learned some valuable lessons over there:

Be careful about feeding the meat grinder. The butcher’s bill is always going to be higher than you think. And the members of Congress who bravely vote to fund our wars don’t have to fight in them.

Here is Hagel in an interview last year with Robert Nolan, an editor at the Foreign Policy Association:

“Here we are 12 years in Afghanistan, having very significant difficulties on winding that down. It’s easy to get into war, it’s easy to intervene. Not easy to ‘un-intervene,’ unwind or get out of war.

“One of the reasons we’re in trouble in Afghanistan is because we went well beyond our mission. We accomplished the mission then we took our eye off the ball and intervened, invaded and occupied Iraq. And now, 12 years later, we’re not sure what our mission is. … We always learn. They’re tough lessons to learn. Vietnam was a tough lesson for us to learn.”